Anthropologist Naisargi Dave credits an undergraduate feminist ethnography class for introducing her to the promise of her discipline. The child of Indian immigrants, Dave was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, in the late 1970s in a “rather culturally conservative” household wherein she began to question the governing power of cultural norms. In her interview Dave shares her thoughts on hypocrisy and how what she calls the “tyranny of consistency” shapes attempts to live ethically. Last, with pluck and candor, Dave shares the story of how she became a vegan and thus helps illustrate her provocative observations about how and why practice can and should precede ideology. We interviewed Dave in Toronto on October 9, 2015.
VICTORIA MILLIOUS: Because we are interested in how personal and academic interests are mutually constitutive, let’s begin with biography. Could you talk about when and where you were born and raised and your formative cultural, intellectual, and political experiences?
NAISARGI DAVE: So I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. My family is from India, from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, specifically. And they migrated to the United States in the early ’70s. I was raised in a suburb of Atlanta, known as Stone Mountain, one of the few Indian students in my classes, and for reasons that I’m only now starting to really think about, I wasn’t very attuned to my racial difference.
My family was—as many Indian immigrant families tend to be— rather culturally conservative. Their thinking was that we have brought you to this strange land, and you’re vulnerable to all of these other kinds of influences, and we need to protect you from that so that you can be raised with the same values that we were raised with. So as you are encountering other people, you see that the things that are so normal for you, the rules that are normal in your household, don’t necessarily apply to other people. The question of hair was a formative one for me and tends to be for queer people and queer women in particular. I had to always have long hair, and my mother had to have long hair, and I would ask, “Why can’t I cut my hair?” And it always came back to, “Well, because that’s our culture.” So I grew up very intrigued with and angry about this concept, that it closed down every question I had. Every curiosity that I had about the world was just met with this one word, culture, as if everyone knew what it was and everyone agreed that it was important and relevant and could govern my life.
I was pre-med and grew up with a very functionalist sense of education. Education is that thing you do so you get a job and you make money, and you make your parents proud, and that kind of thing. But I went away to college and encountered an anthropology class as an elective, and I fell in love with that course—it was a feminist ethnography class, actually. It was the first time in all these years that I could actually discuss the culture concept. This course took up culture as an object of interrogation and not as an a priori good that everyone understands and agrees with.
In terms of formative intellectual experiences, I’m struck by how important friendship was to me. That was my entrée into other worlds outside of my own. The most important lessons that I learned and that I can still see being formative for me, intellectually, are ones that I learned from my first good friends. In high school, it was through friendship that I started thinking about intellectual life as creative and not just functional. It was in friendship that I learned how to debate, question, and argue, instead of the mode of simply asking a question and receiving a supposedly “correct” answer.
VM: And in terms of your moving through to your graduate student experience, could you speak to that?
ND: I took a women’s studies course in college, and that was where I decided to become an academic, maybe before the feminist ethnography course. My women’s studies professor, Nina Karpf, at the University of Georgia, was a very important figure in my life. She was political about the fact that she didn’t have kids, which was also radical to me. It was important for her, and she made a point to say this all the time, “I do not have children, because this is my life. My life is teaching, and you come into my life, and you leave my life, and I’m okay with that. Every year is a different emotional experience for me.” I found that amazing. I find myself thinking about her a lot now, too, in terms of how I organize my own life. But I joke about this as my first “coming out” to my parents, which was to tell them I’m not going to be a doctor, and I’m going to go to graduate school. I had read Ruth Behar, Catherine Lutz, and Kamala Visweswaran in my feminist ethnography course, so I applied to the schools where they taught and wound up at Michigan, which was wonderful. My advisor was Jennifer Robertson, who works on sexuality and technology in Japan. I admired her profoundly. So much actually is generated in admiration, in looking up to somebody as a model of how to organize one’s life and how to live well, and how to live a creative, interesting life.
VM: So, thinking specifically about animals, what do you see as the primary purpose of your academic work, and what are your motivations for engaging in it?
ND: I honestly would say that the primary purpose of my academic work is pleasure.
VM: That’s what we needed to hear today!
ND: I’m not a terribly artistic person, so this is my mode of expression.
VM: Your craft.
ND: There’s nothing else I would rather do, having the freedom of coming up with ideas, expressing them. That, to me, is the main purpose. Though I confess that I feel more of a political purpose with my current project. With my book on queer politics, for example, I didn’t aim for people to become queer when they read my work. That was not exactly the object, neither of my book nor of my teaching. But with this work on animals, I like the thought that someone might think differently about their relationship to animals after reading my work. I wouldn’t frame that as a motivation, though, because those sorts of motivations fail. When you try too hard toward a communicative goal, that effort limits expression, and the things in the field that I’m influenced by are fundamentally expressive. It’s less for me about trying to communicate a specific idea and more about ethnographically conveying the affective experience of being caught up in something.
VM: Could you explain how you came to write about animals?
ND: Sure, I’ll admit this: I went to India often as a kid. And that Western liberal sentimentality, I experienced that myself: the sight of animals on the street. I think those childhood experiences were formative. I still remember the very specific encounters with specific animals.
VM: Can you give us an example?
ND: One was in Ahmedabad. I was out near my mother’s home, where she’d grown up, and there was a donkey, a laboring donkey—it was just a hot, hot day—and the donkey was tied by a short rope on a busy street. There are cars and trucks and people swarming around, and the donkey was saddled with these bags of concrete. Its head was bowed from the weight, and it was just staring at a pole—and there was something about its loneliness, as I perceived it. The fact that this being didn’t experience any beauty or pleasure in life and was standing there saddled with concrete. It made me think a lot about hypocrisy, actually.
There is an assumption about India in the West that we’re all vegetarians and we worship cows and are good to animals. But vegetarianism is specific to Hindus and, specifically, to high caste Hindus. I grew up in a teetotalling vegetarian household, and my mother’s neighborhood in Ahmedabad is a very Brahminical one. There is a widespread belief that people are kind to animals because they don’t eat them. But there were examples everywhere of the complete destitution of animals, the refusal to acknowledge their pain or their suffering when they’re in your midst. And this did, for me, raise the question of hypocrisy, if we can put it that way. Though, as I’ll get back to later, I’ve been rethinking hypocrisy and our critical relationship to it.
Another thing that felt very specifically Indian to me in relation to animals happened in a human rights NGO, populated with young progressives. A foreign visitor, during lunch, asked for the vegetarian dishes. And someone turned to her and said, “I’m sorry, but we are not vegetarians here, vegetarianism is a tool of the right wing. It’s coercive, and it’s oppressive, and it’s elitist dietary politics.” Things of that nature. This seemed such a very different context from a Western one or, really, anywhere else. I would be hard-pressed to think of a place where being progressive precisely means militantly eating animals, whether you want to or not. I know Indians who grew up vegetarian and they eat meat deliberately to, as they say, reject their caste privilege, to prove this point about their solidarity. So that to me was a very interesting phenomenon. All of these things together are what led me to start writing about animals in India.
VM: In an essay in Cultural Anthropology, you discuss how meat eating is often justified as a form of resistance to Hindu nationalism and religious and caste chauvinism in cosmopolitan and progressive circles. This analysis is compelling for what it suggests about the power of ideologies we vehemently oppose to colonize and discipline us. Can you talk about this observation and how, as a scholar of activism, you have come to approach big questions like “social change” and “resistance”?
ND: I love the way you put that: how the ideologies we vehemently oppose colonize and discipline us. There was an event recently that exemplifies this. And dozens of people have forwarded me news stories about it lately, and I feel like the unspoken implication is, “See what you’re participating in as a vegan in India!” What happened is that a Muslim man was accused by Hindu villagers of having killed a calf and eaten it. Based on this rumor, a mob gathered and killed this man, beat one of his sons to within an inch of his life, beat his wife or his mother, and beat another one of his children. This is an all too common example of the way the Hindu right mobilizes the cow—not the animal in general, but the cow—as a symbol to enact violence on other communities, whether they are Dalits, or Muslims, or Christians. This is a thing that happens. So accepting that, and acknowledging the way in which vegetarianism plays into a politics that we abhor: What do we do with that fact? That’s an important question for me. All too often, what we do with that fact is to say that to oppose that kind of violence means to eat cows. It’s posited as a kind of solidarity with non-caste Hindus. But of course the Brahmin who decides, “I’m going to eat beef—or pork or chicken or whatever—” will simply not be subject to the same kind of violence as someone who eats meat by tradition. What this high caste person doesn’t understand is that people aren’t subject to violence because they eat beef: They are subject to violence because they are Muslims or Dalits. The cow was the mobilizer, it was the justification, but it was not the reason. So when a Brahmin decides that they’re going to start eating beef, no matter how much they try to be in solidarity with the Dalit or the Muslim, it’s not going to happen, because what they fail to recognize is they’re just playing into the circulation of symbols that is at the heart of the problem in the first place.
One comparative case is the right wing in the United States, which at times enacts violence against women who have abortions, or the doctors who perform them. We as feminists vehemently oppose that, yes. That does not mean, however, that we go out and deliberately have abortions. Now, they’re not one-to-one comparisons, of course, but the one reason they’re not is that we value humans and animals very differently. Of course we don’t go around having abortions or aborting other people’s fetuses just because we oppose a Christian right ideology. But the issue there, then, is that in understanding the animal as a symbol that is not subject to the same value as a human, you’re participating in and allowing your own ethics to be completely colonized by the use of symbols of an ideology that you oppose. That’s not a rejection of an ideology, it’s an adoption of an ideology, it’s speaking in those people’s terms, it’s using their morality to be the only framework in which you can possibly be a moral person. Your only option then is, do you eat beef or do you not eat beef? That’s not rejecting the use of the cow as a violent symbol; it’s appropriating it, and not appropriating it in a way that undoes the problem. It’s more of a wholesale adoption of an ideology than an appropriation, actually.
You also asked about resistance and social change, and I think it’s important, too, to not see every incidence of this sort of adoption as closure. This is one of the things I was working out in my first book, as well, that we often tend to have very dramatic ideas about social change. It’s important to recognize that limits and problems actually provide the impetus for new ways of thinking, rather than simply being an obstacle or a problem. So, in this case, the moral universe in which I can think about my relationship with animals in India is more or less closed, colonized by the Hindu right, for example. That’s our closure. But what does that closure enable? What emergences are possible there as responses to the limits, which then become foreclosed themselves in different ways, or normalized, and on it goes? I think it’s important to think of social transformation more cyclically, and to acknowledge that everything that we see as problematic is a possibility, an opportunity, and to think more about closure and immanence.
SCOTT CAREY: Could you talk about a key concept or idea that guides your thinking about humans and animals? Earlier, you mentioned hypocrisy as something you’d like to discuss.
ND: Exceptionalism is one. What makes me think that I am so special, that for my comfort or my pleasure I can take another being’s life? Granted, I tend to buy and live vegan, so I’m not actually faced with a lot of dilemmas, but when I am, this is the question I ask myself. Another question, inspired by Montaigne, is this: “What do I know?” I feel at my most open and creative when I imagine myself as quite dumb, as not knowing much of anything at all. I don’t know if a pig suffers, and I don’t know if it doesn’t. I don’t know that a donkey feels lonely and I don’t know if it doesn’t. How on earth would I know? But it’s accepting that I don’t know, rather than insisting that I do, that allows me to be open to different imaginative possibilities rather than wasting my energies defending my ostensible certainties.
And on hypocrisy—thanks for bringing that up. Originally, I used hypocrisy as a negative. Who are these people who go on and on about how they respect animals and then leave a donkey tied to a pole, or throw a cow in a garbage heap? But I started rethinking my relationship to hypocrisy, or to consistency, in the last few years. Here’s why. A student came into my office hours and started crying because she wanted to become a vegetarian and her family and friends responded by pointing out how futile it was by showing all of her contradictions: “What is your bag made of, what are your shoes made of, don’t you drive a car which requires roads which destroy forests and the animals who live in them, and so on?” These aren’t illegitimate questions; they’re interesting food for thought. But I’ve started to think of the problem of hypocrisy also through the tyranny of consistency, which is related very much to identity politics and the recognition that people who do things normatively, who eat anything, who are heterosexual, whatever the case, they do not have to explain the hypocrisies in their own life. It’s only the person who tries to do something different who is then subject to the problem of contradiction. Contradiction itself has become very important to me, and in India, from an ethnographic perspective, it’s important. People ask: “Isn’t there a contradiction in the fact that you care about animals in a way that coincides with what the Hindu right thinks about cows or animal protection?” But also these everyday questions of what does it mean to practice this and fail to practice in this way. So the imperative of perfection, the idea of consistency and how important that is, always doing things the right way, which of course, even people who do things normatively don’t do, but they’re not held to that standard. They’re not asked to account for themselves in the same way. This made me reflect a lot more on contradiction as a problem.
That contradiction doesn’t actually exist between two things but exists in the frame, in our concepts of things, not in the things themselves. It’s only when we frame two things as comparable in the first place, and as the bounded comparison, that two things can appear as contradictions. Once one opens one’s scope, or recognizes that one’s concept of this thing— animal, meat, purse, leather, etc.—is actually more flexible than we think, the contradiction disappears. So contradiction is a problem politically, in terms of the imperative of consistency that forces anyone who tries to do anything differently to make a choice between nothing and everything: I either do it perfectly or I might as well just do nothing. That, of course, is a terrible way to operate, but it tends to be the way we approach ethical life. Except for all the invisible ways in which we’re never perfect moral beings, but we excuse them for various reasons, because they’re normative and thus naturalized. The accusation of hypocrisy is a problem politically, but I think it’s also an interesting problem philosophically, and so, in my new book, that’s one of the things that I’m trying to think through.
SC: You emphasize in another interview the importance of doing intersectional work on animals. This is a common battle cry within critical animal studies, but one that is difficult to put into practice. Can you discuss how you have practiced intersectionality in your work on animals and humans in India and perhaps why critical animal studies has struggled so much to overcome its limitations in this regard? How might this be related to your other claim, that animal activists might not be as self-reflexive and self-critical as other activists?
ND: Well, I can start with the latter, and I feel okay saying this because I had this conversation with a very self-reflexive animal activist. In a way it circles back to what we were talking about earlier—how the starting ground is so different when you’re talking about animals and you’re talking about human rights, that it’s very difficult to think about intersectionality when you’re so completely dismissed by other social movements. I guess it was slightly different in the case of queer activists in India, who are of course, for the same reasons, seen as bourgeois, elitist, having concerns that had nothing to do with real Indians and all of that. Queer activists were looked down upon by more established movements, but the thing is, everybody also realized that there were lesbians and gay men in all of these organizations already. I think that the lack of a certain penetration of animal activists in social movements is part of the issue; but for me it also comes down to the problem of emergency. Where—and this was a problem in queer politics as well— there is so much going on all the time for an animal activist. There is always an emergency. You walk down the street and there are ten things that you could put your attention on, and that make a demand on you. And it does feel like some sort of luxury; it is decadent to spend our time in a reading group, in a room reading Derrida, or Peter Singer, even, when there are things that one could actually be doing. Now this itself is an interesting kind of distinction between the work of contemplation and hands-on labor, one that’s also very divisive within animal rights activism, at least in India. But the people who actually go around working in shelters and picking animals up off the streets are thought of differently than the ones who do more of the organizational kind of work. That to me is one of the issues around intersectionality; it’s just the urgency and the immediacy of things that need to be attended to, and intersectional work seeming like a kind of decadence: Why bother trying to persuade people about this cause when there are things that I could be doing instead that would be more useful?
SC: Could you explain to us how you became a vegan and your current relationship to consuming meat or other animal products?
ND: This is a story I didn’t tell my students for the longest time, and then I decided I would just admit to. Because there’s a lesson here. I became a vegan to impress a hot woman when I was in college. I lived in a rented house and there was a person who worked for my landlord who was mowing the lawn one day. She had great muscles, she looked good. I asked, “Who is that?” I was told her name, and the next thing I was told is “She’s a vegan.” This was very unusual back then. But because I thought maybe it would be impressive to her—she who had never even met me—I just decided one day when we were all at the Waffle House to be vegan. I ordered dry toast and black coffee, and that was that.
I grew up vegetarian, but then did what many vegetarian Indian kids do, which is to rebel and eat meat in college. So I went straight from meat to the dry toast and black coffee at the Waffle House, and I’ve been vegan since then. That was it.
The reason I became okay with telling that story to my students is that in that moment, I didn’t know the first thing about veganism. I hadn’t worked out why I should do it, or what the politics were. It was just a one-off decision made on a lark, kind of as a joke to my friends that day, that then ended up becoming one of the most important things in my life, politically, ethically, intellectually. I think it’s a useful story because it demonstrates that the practice can, perhaps even ought to, precede the ideology. So long as we are practicing something, it’s very difficult for us to see outside of that thing because we’re so invested in that practice, in maintaining ourselves and our lives as they are. It was only when I was no longer eating meat that I was free to think about what meat was.
So long as you try to fix the ideology before the practice—you can say, “Well, first I have to convince myself that veganism is worth doing”—it’s never going to happen because there’s no way to ideologically explain it, because everything is geared toward maintaining the norm. There will always be the one person pointing out the hypocrisy, the flaw in the logic. So if you wait, and wait, and wait to have it all figured out, then you’re not going to get there, and that’s not accidental, that’s by design, that’s how normativity reproduces itself.
I’ve remained a vegan. I was a primarily dietary vegan for a long time. I think it was when I started doing my research for this project, and seeing a calf tied by a short rope to the ground, where it would stay for its whole life, providing milk, that made my veganism more militant, perhaps, more holistic. Now it applies to clothes, household goods, products, everything.
SC: Have your thoughts and feelings regarding the consumption of animal products changed over the course of your scholarly career? We were wondering, in particular, if you could elaborate on a point you made in another interview, where you said, “Had I to decide now, I doubt I would be a strict vegan.”
ND: Let me explain what I mean since I left it deliberately vague there. What I meant is that my practice would remain the same. I’m not just going to suddenly start doing things that I find personally appalling, or gross, or problematic. That’s not what I mean. All I mean is that I now recognize the role that the tyranny of consistency plays, not in furthering what I consider to be ethical goods but in preventing them. What I mean by “had I to decide now, I doubt I would be a strict vegan,” I just mean that I wouldn’t identify as such, I would just live the way I live without the label. Because the contradictions only arise when you create a thing that can then be compared to another thing, and some contradiction can be recognized there. I also feel like it’s politically not efficacious to make something that I feel strongly about be tied in with my identity. The fact that somebody thinks that they have to “become a vegan” in order to change their relationship to food is, I think, terribly problematic.
Let’s create practices in which contradiction isn’t even possible, in which it’s just an ethical life, but not bound by new norms and new rules that then have to be overcome, or transcended, or questioned, or interrogated necessarily. It’s also not efficacious to tie ethics to politics because, in a way, and this is a slightly more abstract reason, it’s kind of daring somebody, it’s a power play. If I convince someone to become a vegan, they’ve essentially subjected themselves. I say, “This is my ethics,” and for you to agree with me means for you to become like me. Who wants to do that? I know I reject anyone telling me what to be, and what to do, and what to think, so of course anybody else does too, and why would somebody want to subject themselves to somebody else’s moral regime? Also, just from a perspective of what’s efficacious and what’s not, I don’t always think that veganism, as an identity category, is all that persuasive.
SK: When I read your work, I think there’s no way I could have done that fieldwork, witnessed that torment, which is probably not the effect— or affect—that you’re trying to induce in your reader. It made me think about the limits of my own ability to experience animal suffering up close.
ND: Well, it was a huge revelation for me that I could, because people send me awful videos all the time and I don’t watch them, nor do I watch documentaries about the meat industry. I don’t open these links, I don’t subject myself to these things. What I realized in the field is that the difference is between more and less mediated experiences. There was something about the immediacy of these situations, of being in a slaughterhouse, of literally standing in blood. There are several things going on here. One is just a simple numbing effect. You’re overstimulated; you can’t cognitively bear everything that’s going on around you. I would slip into something that was almost like a—and this isn’t something I share, and so I might later regret this—but there was almost like a giddiness, a euphoric feeling.
That to me was really disruptive, because it made me realize how easy it could be to normalize killing, even to kill. I talk about this in another paper that just came out on the poultry industry, and there’s a moment where I’m watching these birds being unloaded from a truck, and it is a horrible scene. But I had a moment where the guys who worked in the factory were watching me with amusement. Here is this Western short-haired chick who’s probably freaking out right now. And what I wanted to say to them was, I feel exactly the way you do about these birds. It is really hard to think about them as anything other than objects, when they are placed this way. You get into a mode of “I’m alive, and you’re not.” It’s amazing how—and I talk about this in the poultry paper—a twenty-year vegan, bleeding heart, I cry at the sight of a lonely donkey, and yet here I am, suddenly just heartless. Just utterly heartless.
SK: Is there anything you want to add about the relationship between your academic work and your personal practices?
ND: Well, in a strange way writing this book has made me less of a vegan in identity terms, more of a vegan in practice, if that makes any sense [laughs].
SK: Such feelings are hard to shake, but do you think you’ve become less judgmental of people’s attitudes toward eating animals as a result of the problem around consistency and hypocrisy that you’ve so eloquently explained [laughs]?
ND: Actually, no [laughs]. I wish, I wish. As you say, we can’t escape it. We’re judgey about all sorts of things we feel strongly about. I think it has changed my relationship with humans, but I’m not exactly sure how. Even in my queer life, I can sense that same movement where I think I’m more queer in practice, and much less queer in identity now. Being less the label enables me to be more the practice. I’m less constrained by the rules, the proper way to be this or be that and how to present myself.
I definitely think that the veganism and my political relationship to animals play a big role in what I write. And I do want to separate, as much as it might be difficult to separate them, the question of being motivated by a certain message that I want to get out, because I don’t know, actually, what that message is. I absolutely have no idea. I think the objective is just telling a good story, not good as in entertaining, but something that affects. And I have no idea what the effect is or is not going to be, but if you don’t affect, then there’s no question about what the effect is going to be or not be—because there isn’t one. Writing about animals has made me more queer in my writing, because I know that having a message backfires. I don’t seek to have a message; I think adamant messaging is part of our moral problem. So it’s that I want to write truly and queerly.
SK: Can you tell us a story about a time when your veganism has been the subject of awkwardness, celebration, hostility, or something else entirely?
ND: Well, there’s a story about my mom [laughs]. My mom was actually more devastated about my being vegan than about my being a lesbian [laughs]. I remember one day she made something, and this was very early on in my veganism, and she hadn’t quite picked up on my rules of what I could and couldn’t eat. And she worked really hard on this dish, shrikand, something I really liked as a child. And I, of course, with all of my ideological righteousness, said, “I’m not going to eat that!” And she asked, “Can you explain this to me?” And I said something about cruelty to animals, and she said “Cruelty to animals? What about cruelty to mother?”
[All laugh]
ND: Her whole position, which is one I hear often, and I think Jonathan Safran Foer raises critically in Eating Animals, but something Michael Pollan advocates, is that people’s animal politics make them cruel to people, because it doesn’t allow them to break bread with them.
I think that’s absurd for the reasons that Safran Foer talks about: What it means to break bread is precisely to talk, to communicate. My simply going along with what everyone else around me is doing is not something to be valorized. Commensality is discourse. Being normal isn’t conversation.
Like many of us, I tend to keep company with people who largely share my worldview. So it’s rare that my veganism has been the subject of true awkwardness or militant opposition. I certainly eat with a lot of carnivores, but usually it’s, at worst, the boring hypocrisy conversation: what about this, what about that, those sorts of things. I have friends who want to have interesting, intellectual debates about what it means to make certain kinds of ethical choices. So in the way that Safran Foer says, I think my veganism is a way to actually open up all sorts of really interesting conversations. Even before I started thinking about consistency and identity—and sometimes I’m ashamed of myself for this—but I don’t tend to be very political about my veganism at meals. I’m a vegan, and I eat vegan, and if you want to talk to me about it, I’m happy to talk about it, but I don’t really want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it in part because it’s emotionally difficult for me. It’s partly because I keep company with people I respect, and I hate disagreeing with them about something so fundamental. I would rather be blind to that sometimes, and to feel like I have more in common with my friends than maybe I do. I also don’t want to have the same conversation at every meal. I understand that it’s important, and that’s why I feel ashamed of my reticence. I know that there are people who are better activists than I am, who are willing to have that same conversation every time they sit down to a meal; I don’t always want to. But this also rather baldly comes back to what I was saying earlier about efficacy. It’s not just that I get tired of talking about veganism; it’s not just that it’s emotionally difficult for me to have these debates. It’s that I know that it doesn’t work. I just appreciate the fact that when I eat vegan more people end up also having to, if they want to share a meal with me, or they try to make it easier on everybody and we go to a vegetarian restaurant, or whatever the case is, and I usually kind of leave it there. It’s modest, but it’s more honest to who I am.
SK: That raises the question about moving across different geographies, and navigating your veganism as you do so.
ND: Yes, it’s in India where I have faced the militant, and not just tedious, responses. The nonsense about being in bed with the Hindu right because I’m not eating animals. To me, it’s just so obvious that violence is not an appropriate response to violence. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I see the worldview in which it does make sense, which is a worldview of hierarchy and normative value, but this brings us back to the “What do I know?” question. I’m happy for people—I’m, of course, being sarcastic—who know what the hierarchy of value is. But I feel I need to answer the question “What makes me so special that I perform my politics by taking another being’s life?” At the end of the day, the answer is pure metaphysics. What makes me so special? Well, I am. Because I say so.
Being vegan instead of vegetarian is actually useful in India, though. The Hindu right is as appalled by the rejection of milk as they claim to be appalled by the slaughter of cows. So while vegetarianism is associated with right-wing politics, veganism is, at worst, associated with being Westernized. It has a different valence than vegetarianism.
SK: Could you talk us through your typical approach to buying or otherwise procuring food?
ND: Sure. I’m vegan, but I’m also just into being obnoxiously healthy. Those two things, they go together in some ways, but not necessarily in other ways. The veganism plays an important role in terms of setting rules; there are just things I don’t buy because they’re not vegan. I tend to do the classic Pollan thing of only buying from the outside aisles of the grocery store, and buying very few processed foods. So those are some rules. But I also had an important insight a few years ago that rules can be counterproductive to a healthy life. For instance, I had a rule for a while about not having carbs after lunch. But I was hugely unsatisfied—I love carbs—and so I ended up, ultimately, eating badly. If you’re just blindly following rules, you’re not actually living a life, you’re not living in your body. So besides the vegan rules, the only other one is that I do not deprive myself of what I want and need. That’s the only rule I found that I actually have to follow. Of course that also means having to be in touch with who you are as a physical being, and that’s precisely one of the things that a rule-bound framework prevents. I don’t need to be in touch with who I am—and we can extrapolate this to queerness, to veganism, and all sorts of things. I don’t have to be in touch with who I am as a person, because I already know who I am. I’m a vegan and I like women. I often find myself maybe chucking those rules, at least hypothetically; and just paying attention to “What do I want, what do I crave?” ends up being the only rule to follow.
SK: This is a really good segue to the next question. You clearly try to avoid universal moral prescriptions in your work and are at pains to emphasize the importance of openness, of not knowing in advance what one will argue or what kind of politics one will pursue. This is easier said than done—how do you resist the urge to fall back into predictable or comfortable ways of thinking?
ND: Well, the first thing is that I think about how much I hate it when other people do that [laughs], and how impossible we become. Few things are more important to me in life than the value of a good conversation. You can’t have a good conversation with someone who already thinks they know everything, and they know how everybody should live. I feel like all the beautiful things in the world—expression, discovering new ideas—it all emerges when you allow yourself to be dumb, to not know everything. Maybe I police myself a little bit; I try to catch myself falling into militancy or, worse, self-satisfaction. I try to catch myself. Interestingly, several of the animal activists whom I work with in India are into vipassana meditation. This is also related to the question you were asking me earlier about what it meant to be around so much animal suffering. Well, this is how they deal with it. They practice meditation. It started out for me as a way of understanding my interlocutors better, going on a ten-day vipassana retreat. But it became something much more than just learning how my interlocutors do things; it became a central practice for myself. That’s where I started thinking about deprivation and excess. I also find that a daily meditation practice is, at the end, the most useful way to avoid moral prescriptions. But some might say that itself is a moral prescription!
SK: Do you see yourself continuing to pursue research on animals?
ND: I think I’m a serial monogamist in my writing [laughs]! I’ll write on queer politics, and then run away as far as I can. Then I devote myself to thinking about animal politics, and then I’m sure I’ll run away as far as I can. But that’s okay. It’s taxing writing about something you care about. And this goes back to the very first question you asked about motivation. I think a lot about David Graeber’s essay on animals in play, and for writers or academics, this is our version of play. And play is interesting insofar as it’s not about the repetition of the same, but about horizons, affect, the emergent. And of course, I don’t know how many times I’ve mentioned queerness in this conversation, so obviously I haven’t gone very far away from that. So it’s interesting to see how ideas stay the same but perhaps in new and less recognizable shapes. My next project won’t superficially be about “animals,” but at the level of substance, I’m sure it will be infused with all of the things I’m learning and thinking about right now—maybe it will be animal rather than being about animals.